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Below are some of my recommendations. All are books which are classics in their genre which I have read more than once. All are 'thundering good reads' in their own way. This page will be added to soon and will be altered on a regular basis.
Last Updated 30 July 2001
To order just click on the book(s) of your choice and you will be linked to the Amazon Web Site. Use the Index to get to a genre quickly.
Index: John Masters & JG Farrell : War - 20th Century : Philosophy : Ancient Roman History & Greek Classics : History Various & Historical Novels : Ray Bradbury : Alistair Cooke : Miscellaneous : Music :
Books by John Masters & J.G. Farrell - classic books about India in the time of the Raj
THE NIGHTRUNNERS OF BENGAL Continuing 'saga' of the Savage family, this time the time of the 'Indian Mutiny'.
NB Regretfully the other JM books I recommend are now out of print.
THE SEIGE OF KRISHNAPUR - J.G. Farrell - Winner of the 1973 Booker Prize, this story is set in Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a bloody mutiny. Then the Sepoys at the military cantonment revolt and the British community retreats into the Residency. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency becomes ever more vulnerable.
War - 20th Century topics including Aviation etc.
CATCH 22 by Joseph Heller - The expression Catch 22 is now in everyday use. This magnificent book is about the terrible days when it was not.
THE NAKED AND THE DEAD . Described as on of the greatest war books to come out of the USA
FATE IS THE HUNTER The book chronicles Gann's career as a an airline pilot with more than 10,000 hours in his log book. I read this book at least 25 years ago and have thought about it as a "must find and re-read". I finally found it on this site and it was just as memorable as I remembered it.
ENEMY COAST AHEAD - Guy Gibson VC. The story is censored due to the fact it was written in war time, so some information is not readily available. However, this is a book worth reading. It gives you an insight into the perils and dangers experienced by men in the RAF. Gibson is best known as the leader of operation chastise: the Dam Busters. Although the content is clearly edited and censored for sensitive material and secret weapons (radar) I found it a gripping tale and the jargon and WWII expressions add to the atmosphere of the book.
THE DAM BUSTERS - Paul Brickhill. The Dam Busters tells the story of how the crews of 617 Squadron Bomber Command used their flying skills, their tremendous courage and Barnes Wallis' highly accurate bombs to deal devastating blows to Nazi Germany.
ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTAINENCE If you haven't read this yet try and take the time to do so. It is at different levels a facinating journey across the USA by a man and his son and a deep look at philosophy which is brilliantly made accessable to the normal reader by the imagery of the workings of a motorcycle.
MEDITATIONS OF MARCUS AURELIUS The facinating thoughts of a great Roman. All the more remarkable as they were never intended to be seen by anyone other than the author.
Ancient Roman History & Greek Classics
ANNALS OF IMPERIAL ROME by Tacitus FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC by Plutrach
LIVES OF THE 12 CAESARS by Suetonius - These books give a clear insight into the facinating world that so shaped ours.
THE ILIAD of HOMER - Martin Hammond (Translator. Full of depth, and, well, violence... The characterisation in this epic are second to none. The battle scenes are sometimes brutal and always surprising, but this is contrasted with an amazingly in depth story of love and loyalty. Well worth reading even if you aren't a classical scholar.
THE ODYSSEY of HOMER - Martin Hammond (Translator). The Odyssey" is one of the earliest works of European literature, second only to "The Iliad". These two great epic poems, the astonishing first fruits of Greek civilisation, have together determined much of the course of Western literary culture and imagination. "The Odyssey" tells of the long and painful return of Odysseus from the Trojan War to his homeland of Ithaka, his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachos. Even after he finally returns, there are enemies to be fought in his house. The action of the poem covers a huge canvas, ranging widely over time and place, exploring the known and the unknown worlds, involving magic and monsters, gods and ghosts, dangers defied: throughout there runs a strong and eloquent insistence on the humanity of man and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. This new translation by Martin Hammond complements his translation of "The Iliad". It aims to capture as closely as possible both the simplicity and the intensity of Homer's epic
History Various & Historical Novels
HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES by Sir Winston Churchill. The whole sweep of his 6 books precied into two volumes of page-turning history told by one of the greatest users of the English language. If you want history to be accessable, this is as good as it gets.
THIS SCEPTERED ISLE - Christopher Lee. The history of Britain from the Roman invasion to the death of Queen Victoria. Based on Churchill's Nobel prizewinning "History of the English-speaking People"
The one thing we can never loose in Great Britain is our history. This book covers this enormous subject in an informative and easy to read fashion. I have always been interested in our history, but the books I've tried to read have always been far to heavyweight and verbose. This book brings the story of our Islands to life. It also covers the various interactions with other countries (for example a quite detailed account of the American war of independence and some of their civil war), but does not stray from the main theme too far.
I Listened to the radio series on which this book is based and it is an excellent companion.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL The very readable story of the 2nd World War from the view of captured German Officers. Liddell-Hart is acknowledged as one of the greatest war historians of our times.
MASTER and COMMANDER - Patrick O'Brian. The first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels in which the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin is established. Life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war is depicted with a strong sense of period.
The opening salvo of the Aubrey-Maturin epic, in which the surgeon introduces himself to the captain by driving an elbow into his ribs during a chamber music recital. Fortunately for millions of readers, the two quickly make up. Then they commence one of the great literary voyages of our century, set against an immaculately detailed backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. This is the place to start--and in all likelihood, you won't be able to stop.
THE IONIAN MISSION - Patrick O'Brian. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to the seas where they first sailed as shipmates. A sudden turn of events takes them off on a mission to the Greek islands, where Aubrey's old skills of seamanship and proverbial luck when fighting against odds, come triumphantly into their own.
THE FORTUNE of WAR - Patrick O'Brian. Captain Jack Aubrey RN, is appointed to the command of the fastest frigate in the Navy. He and his friend Stephen Maturin take passage for England, but the war of 1812 breaks out while they are en route. Stephen's past activities as a secret agent return to him with a vengeance.
Books by Ray Bradbury The master of Fantasy and in my opinion one of the most wonderful users of the English Language.
FAHRENHEIT 451 In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books.
GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN is a collection of stories in which Ray Bradbury's imagination turns inside out, revealing the strange desires of men and monsters. Read especially 'The Fog Horn, 'The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl', The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind', The Sound of Thunder' .......
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN tales that were tattooed onto the body of a man by a witch. At night the tales moved and glowed. There was one patch where the picture was blurred and un-clear ...this was the most terrifying of them all!
THE MARTIAN CHRONICALS (Also abridged as 'The Silver Locusts'). An erie expedition to man's nearest planet, Mars. Do Martians really exist? Will man be able to colonize a world which appears, at first sight, to be much like his own? Or is it true that things are never quite what they seem.... This book is now regarded as one of the classic works of the genre.
ALISTAIR COOKE - MEMORIES OF THE GREAT AND GOOD Some of the memoirs of possibly the greatest broadcaster of the English language ever.
THE SWORD OF HONOUR TRILOGY - Evelyn Waugh. This trilogy of novels about WW2, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of EW’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback , head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexeties and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often sombre, the trilogy ia also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh’s early satires.
ENGLAND THEIR ENGLAND - A.G. Macdonnell (Contains ‘The Cricket Match’ – possibly the funniest account of any game, anywhere.) A Scotsman tours England in the 1920s, describing it as the Mars it was to him, working in a tiny provincial newspaper office and for a similar MP. Hislop is charmed by its authenticity which is nevertheless (I think he says this) falling off his chair funny.
THE COMPLETE BRITISH WILDLIFE - Paul Sterry. This photographic guide describes almost all the mammals, birds and butterflies likely to encountered by the keen amateur naturalist in Britain, as well as all the common flowers, trees and shrubs. It also includes a few unusual species of plants and animals.
An excellent book for reference, especially in your garden. I especially found it useful in identifying the birds in my garden and the wild flowers in the local hedgerows.
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING - Bill Bryson - describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings
BERLIOZ:
THE MAKING OF AN ARTIST - David
Cairns. Life stories come in all sizes, from the smallest notice in a dictionary
of musical biography to largest multi-volume epic. Fitting form to subject,
David Cairns's enormous retelling of Berlioz's--of which this is volume one
(running from 1803-1832)--is on the grandest possible scale. It contains a
tremendous amount of fascinating detail, and conveys a real sense of what it was
like to grow up in France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic defeats. But above
all it is a completely convincing portrait of the character of Berlioz himself,
and of his sense of his own artistic mission. He lived passionately, sometimes
gushingly. When he fell in love, for instance, he did so hyperbolically
("my heart expands and my imagination struggles to comprehend this
intensity of happiness");he suffered amorous reversals with melodramatic
intensity ("wandering the streets at night with a bitter grief that haunts
me like a red-hot iron on my breast"), and he spoke with gusto of the
effect great art had on him("I came out of Hamlet shaken to the core
by the experience; I vowed I should not expose myself a second time to the flame
of Shakespeare's genius"). But one of the nice things in Cairns's account
is the way the ordinary neatly undercuts Berlioz's self- dramatisation; for
instance the letter to his mother that begins "thank you, dear Mama, for
the handkerchiefs. What I am short of is stockings."
Volume One takes us up to the composition of Berlioz's early triumph, theFantastic
Symphony, which Cairns describes in powerful prose. But most absorbing are
the accounts of Berlioz's all-consuming love affairs: his boyhood infatuation
with Estelle Dubeuf, his obsessive love for the English actress Harriet Smithson,
for whom he learned to speak English, and his more realistic love for the
pianist Camille Moke. You finish reading it eager to carry the story on in
volume two, Servitude
and Greatness --Adam Roberts
BERLIOZ
VOLUME TWO: SERVITUDE AND GREATNESS - David Cairns. The conclusion to
David Cairns's epic biography of Hector Berlioz has been eagerly awaited ever
since volume one, Berlioz: the Making of an Artist appeared in 1989. With
an achievement as massive as that highly praised volume part of the tension of
waiting for the follow-up involves wondering whether Cairns can capture again
the sweep, the vividness and the power of his first book. But he has managed to
do exactly that.
Cairns picks up the story at the time of Berlioz's marriage to Harriet Smithson
in 1833, with whom he had been obsessively infatuated for so long. It's a
mournful story, with her alcoholism, the separation in 1844 and her premature
death in 1854, Cairns links the vicissitudes of Berlioz's own life directly with
his music. The composition of La Morte d'Ophelie marks the symbolic end
of their marriage. "The elegaic significance of this infinitely sad melody
would be hard to miss". Cairns writes sensitively and evocatively about
Berlioz's music, and one of the central pillars of this second volume is a
compelling defence of Berlioz's Trojans (1856), his much-maligned and
chopped-about masterpiece. Critics of the day were not kind: "so vulgar, so
badly designed and so distorted with impossible modulations that one would take
it to be the music of a deaf man;" said one. There were many cartoons,
which Cairns reprints, along the lines of "New method of killing cattle to
be introduced at all slaughterhouses" in which an ox is pictured felled by
having The Trojans played to it through a large tuba. But Cairns
convincingly demonstrates just how far ahead of his time Berlioz was, and how
heroic was his struggle to have this titanic opera performed and accepted in the
teeth of persistent obstacles. It is Cairns' opinion that Berlioz, "like
the biblical man, was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards." His
biography follows the tragedies and the triumphs of this larger-than-life
individual with a narrative force as strong as a good novel. --Adam Roberts
FUNDAMENTALS of MUSICAL ACOUSTICS - Arthur H Benade. A wonderful work that introduces the principles of waves and vibrations, musical perception and instrument physics without too much mathematics. Specific chapters on violin, piano, clavicord and harpsichord, winds (brass and wood). Several references to guitar. The book is a little old, which shows in the references, but is an excellent text for self study. Most chapters have at the end a list of interesting experiments that one can perform. Overall a must first book if you are interested in the field.
The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music - This concise dictionary has been updated. Based on the 20 volume "New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians", it is designed to meet the needs of a wide readership, from the musical novice requiring a quick and clear explanation of terminology to the musical expert in need of more detailed information. There are 10,000 entries, which include 4500 on composers, 2000 on terms, instruments and institutions, 1100 on performers and other key figures, 1000 titles of musical works and 150 worklists for major composers. Other features of this dictionary include historical accounts of important topics, outlines of non-Western music systems, discussions of musical acoustics, music examples and illustrations.
The Bumper Book of Operatic Disasters - Hugh Vickers, Michael ffolkes (Illustrator). Gathers together some of the author's favourite anecdotes of operatic disasters. This book includes: the Tosca who bounced; the soprano who sang an entire aria stuck upside down in a sedan chair; and the Duke of Manuta who swallowed his moustache.
The Book of Musical Anecdotes - Norman Lebrecht. Hundreds of Classic and Little-Known Stories About the World's Greatest Composers and Performers. Lebrecht gives life to these composers/musicians much in the same spirit that they gave of themselves in their own works. In many ways, these stories are as informative as some music history texts. From Bach to Stravinsky, these stories will make you laugh and cry. Full of humorous, informative and touching stories, you won't regret you bought this!
Woodwind Instruments and Their History - Anthony Baines .
Clarinet - Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides - Jack Brymer. One of the justly famous series of music guides written by one of the greatest clarinettists of the 20th century. And British too!
Horn - Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides - Barry Tuckwell. As above, this guide is written by the equally renowned Horn Player. Unfortunately he is an Australian!
On Playing the Horn - Farquharson Cousins. Written after a lifetime of horn playing with the likes of Dennis Brain and as 1st horn to a new lad on the scene, Barry Tuckwell. This very interesting and humourous book should be of interest to all horn players. It also has much to recommend it for players and conductors alike. I particularly recommend it as 'Farkie' is the father of our principal flute.
British and International Music Yearbook: 2000 - Louise Head (Editor). A directory of the classical music industry 18,000 contacts : instrumentalists, singers, agents, publishers, venues, orchestras, record companies, promoters, musician services, education and more. Includes all the new local and national dialling codes.
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